Ruth J. Simmons

For National Teacher Appreciation Day on May 7th, we are sharing a collection of titles about teaching, from personal stories that include advice and act as a guide for new or aspiring teachers to books about the history of education that show the struggles teachers have endured and the gains they received from persistence.

From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Ruth J. Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated